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Thursday, 26 May 2016

By Suzi Kerr and Catherine Leining, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Under its Budget 2016 package, the New Zealand government announced today that it will progressively phase in a full unit obligation for non-forestry sectors in the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) over a three-year period.

According to the media release from Hon Paula Bennett, Minister for Climate Change Issues, “The current 50 per cent unit cost will increase to 67 per cent from 1 January, then 83 per cent from 1 January 2018, with all sectors in the ETS paying the full market price from 1 January 2019. The current price ceiling which caps units at $25 will remain.”

Restoring a full unit obligation in the NZ ETS represents an important step forward for incentivising domestic mitigation but future emission prices remain uncertain in the absence of broader decisions on future unit supply.

During the past two years, participants in Motu's Low-Emission Future Dialogue have explored possible pathways toward a successful low-emission economy for New Zealand. Participants engaged in their personal capacity, not as organisational or sector representatives. Detailed ideas that emerged from the process are captured in this “idea bank” document, which is offered in the spirit of sparking discussion, not as recommendations. While acknowledging the vital role that forestry will play, the participants focused on the stationary energy, land transport and agriculture sectors. Additional outcomes from the process are presented in the synthesis report New Zealand’s Low-Emission Future: Transformational Pathways.

Wednesday, 11 May 2016

Dr Susan P Krumdieck is Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Advanced Energy and Material Systems Lab, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Can technology solve the climate problem? Dr Krumdieck outlines her work on a new interdisciplinary practice called transition engineering: changing course one innovative project at a time.

Business leaders recognise that the biggest
risk to their business is energy transition. The most popular concept of this
transition involves a substitution of renewables for fossil fuels and
development of elusive tail-pipe technologies like carbon-capture and storage.
This concept is comforting and simple. But it is also profoundly wrong. There
is no way to achieve an energy transition without completely reworking every
aspect of our infrastructure, industry and economy to vastly reduce energy
demand. Changing the global economy to nearly eliminate the use of fossil fuels
is a “wicked problem” – a problem with no known solution. This is why the new
field of energy transition engineering is emerging.

About this Blog

What are New Zealand’s possible pathways toward a global low-emission future, and what important choices lie ahead? This blog creates a forum for sharing information and perspectives about the mitigation challenges that New Zealand faces, the assets that we have, the solutions that might be developed or adapted, the lessons we can learn from overseas and the experience that we can offer to other countries.

This blog is part of Motu's Low-Emission Future project. See our about page for more information on the blog and see here for more information about the project.

The posts and comments on this blog are the views of the specific author; they are not the views of the author's organisation, other contributors, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, the programme's funders, or the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute.